Tag: Promise

The Law and the Promise

In the Young Adult group that meets on Wednesday evenings, in between silly movies, we’ve been reading Galatians. And to Lutherans in the know Galatians is probably the most Lutheran book of the bible. It is a book about the proper distinction of law and gospel. And distinction is the right word.  They are two separate covenants – Abraham and Moses. But the covenant with Abraham – “he believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6, Galatians 3:6)” – is both prior to that with Moses and more direct. God speaks directly with Abraham.  The covenant of Sinai with Israel is mediated by Moses.  Exodus has Moses going up the mountain and down the mountain and up and down each time relaying parts of a negotiation.  Down, I’ve met the LORD. Up, the people of Israel say you are scary.  Down, tell them they are right and to back away from the mountain. Up, they’ve agreed and backed away. Let me bring down your word. You should go down first.  Down, witnesses the golden calf. Breaks the law. Cleans up Israel.  Up, yes, God, I’m sorry, I dropped the tablets. I’ll make a copy.  Down, here is the law again, will you keep it? Up, they said they’d keep it. Down, we need to assemble the elders for a meal on the mountain. Up, a meal with the Elder and the LORD to celebrate the covenant of Moses.  The covenant with Abraham is the promise – the gospel.  Believe, God will do it, God has done it. The covenant with Moses is the law.

Isaiah 56, our Old Testament lesson for this Sunday, is an interesting mixture of the promise and the law. But I can’t help but hear the gospel predominate. “Thus says the LORD: Keep justice, and do righteousness, for soon my salvation will come, and my righteousness be revealed (Isaiah 56:1).” Paul would say something like the law was given to us as guardian (Galatians 3:24). And there is nothing wrong with the law.  The law is good and wise. It is justice. It is righteousness. It’s problem is that the law cannot make us righteous. It instead exposes that we are far from righteous and injustice is what sow. Often injustice is what we sow exactly when we think we are meeting it out.  And so what we need is the promise.  “My salvation will come, my righteousness be revealed.” God will act.  And in the act of God we shall find our salvation, even victory over our sinful selves.

And this is the superiority of the Gospel – of the direct promise. It is available to all. It is available not to the offsprings of Abraham, the pure physical descent.  It is available through the offspring – Christ (Galatians 3:16).  Isaiah puts this in a different key.  He calls out the foreigner, that is the gentile, and the eunuch, that one literally cut off. Our lesson cuts this line out.  Probably because of squeamishness over eunuch.  “Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the LORD say ‘The LORD will surely separate me from his people’; and let not the eunuch say ‘behold, I am a dry tree. (Isaiah 56:3)’” Isaiah implores both to “hold fast to my covenant.”

Which covenant?  He mentions the Sabbath and the sacrifices.  The sacrifices are clearly part of the law.  But the Sabbath goes back to the beginning.  On the seventh day, God rested.  The toil of the law – the guardian – is felt.  But he Sabbath rest comes.  And yes, the necessities of the sacrifices of the law once filled the temple.  And Christ cleared it saying “my house shall be a house of prayer for all peoples (Luke 19:46).” For Christ is the salvation of God.  And Christ is the righteousness of God.  It is not that the law is useless or contrary.  It is that the promise is stronger.  The law kills us, but God is the God of life.

And he gathers us all into his house of prayer. He promises the eunuch “I will give you a house within my walls, and a name that shall not be cut off.” He promises the foreigner, “I will gather others to him, besides those already gathered.”  These I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in prayer. Paul would say in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. In Christ we are heirs of the promise.  And we have seen his deliverance revealed.

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The Lion and the Lamb

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Biblical Text: Isaiah 11:1-10

I was trying something different with this sermon. I was also trying something different with the Pastor’s Corner this week. Advent is a vibe. Advent is promise and fulfillment overlapping. And at least in this world the fulfillment never seems complete, but the promise remains. While the corner tried to pull the reader into that time where John the Baptist and his message was the most important thing ever heard, this sermon attempts to map how the church today might feel postexilic. It attempts to point out what has been fulfilled. And start to understand why we have this feeling of longing and maybe slight sadness that often comes with it. Different times and places have different vibes. This was an attempt to understand ours. And still lean into the promise.

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Easter Mystery

The great truths of any faith are always a mystery.  What do I mean by that?  What is a mystery?  I’m not thinking of Scooby Doo and the mystery machine, nor Sherlock Holmes or your favorite writer.  Those are all mysteries that can be solved.  A fact is hidden that the investigator can reveal by the end of the book or episode. No, the mystery of a faith is something that is already completely revealed.  It has been revealed before the face of all people. The mystery of a faith is something that can be intuitively understood.  It makes complete sense, and yet is non-sense. Our minds can’t really process it.  Even though we might see it. 

The sacraments are such mysteries.  Water, bread and wine do amazing things. And we can see what they do in the lives of the faithful.  But do we really understand how the Spirit hovers in those waters?  Can we really grasp how we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ?  We recognize the body of Christ. Comprehend is a different matter.

The greatest of these mysteries is the resurrection. We all have an intuitive grasp that death is a horror, an enemy, not natural. As much as the materialists of our generation want to say that death is a natural part of life, it isn’t. It’s part of the life of sinners. It is part of life in a cracked world.  But death is not a rightful inhabitant.  But how do sinners combat their just penalty?  “For in Adam we all die.” (1 Corinthians 15:21).  God in his great mercy has sent us a champion. “In Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:21). 

Staring directly at the mystery is tough.  Mysteries are singularity events. We can’t really penetrate them in themselves. How exactly God and man together is one Christ is the mystery of the incarnation. You can meditate on Christmas forever and not understand it. But it speaks to our souls.  You can stare at the empty tomb and not understand.  But it breathes hope.

Isaiah captures that hope so well.  The promise of the new heavens and the new earth (Isaiah 65:17). For that is what the resurrection is, the first fruits of the new creation. And in the new creation, “the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” It’s a common question about heaven “what about those who aren’t there?”  Or, “what about fill in the blank of something that meant so much here?” They shall not come to mind.  Why?

Isaiah’s answer I think is simply the reality of the resurrection shall turn this broken creation into Paul’s light momentary affliction. “I will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in my people.” If God is glad, can we be anything but? “No more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping and the cry of distress.” And Isaiah goes on to list things that are sadly too common – not mysteries at all in this world – that shall not happen in the new.  “They shall not labor in vain or bear children for calamity (Isaiah 65:23).” The teacher of Ecclesiastes – all is vanity – shall be out of work.  And the wolf and the lamb shall graze together.

We see the effects of the mystery.  Even now we can see the mystery at work.  Name another place outside the church that gathers together such different people. But what we see today is nothing compared to that day.  The day that the last enemy is destroyed forever. Have a blessed Easter. 

Patience, Love and Promise

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Biblical Text: Luke 20:9-20

Of all the genre of biblical literature I think we hear the parable the worst. Maybe that is in line with how they were originally told. When asked Jesus said he spoke in parables “so that they may hear and never understand. (Matthew 13:14).” We either think they are too easy and we walk away with a dead letter. Or we try and make them way too complex looking for esoteric meanings. There is usually nothing wrong with the too easy, except that they just become cute stories with no current relevance. The too complex is usually heretical. They do require some meditation. And they are usually a little more challenging than just a cute story. The parable here is of the wicked tenants. The sermon has quick examples of too easy and too hard. But what most of the parables want to tell us is what the Father is like. And in this case it is about the patience, love and promise of the Father. The parable tells us how the vineyard runs. And leaves us in the vineyard. Leaves us with the question of if we would stay in the vineyard, or will we too lose it.

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Christmas Eve 2024

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2024 feels like to me the year gambling took over everything. That’s something of the theme of this homily. It is possible to look at the biblical story through gambler’s eyes. It’s even on old tradition in Pascal’s wager. But that really isn’t the biblical story. It is not a gamble, it’s a gift. It’s the will of God that you are his child. The child in a manger is not God rolling the dice over your soul. He is the light in the midst of the darkness. He is the love of God for you. Evermore and Evermore.

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Them Bones

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Biblical Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14

The text is one of the most famous in all of scripture – Ezekiel’s Dry Bones. It’s famous, because of how it works on the heart if you allow it. If this field of scattered bones is the whole house of Israel, if the chosen people can come to this, what about us? And you’ve got to think about it because the Spirit takes you there and places you in the middle of it. And God asks you the question, “Can these bones live?”

Ezekiel has a reply, not an answer. The answer is God’s. But it is not the easy triumphalism we want. Nor is it a counsel of despair. It is a promise. It’s the Word proclaimed. This sermon hopefully opens the heart and lets that work on it.

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Promise, Fulfillment, Praise

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This sermon first examines what a blessing is. Elizabeth blesses Mary, and she blesses all those who believe the words of the LORD. A blessing is far more than fortune or well-wishes. A blessing is a form of promise. And it is that promise that is part of a cycle of the Christian life. Promise gives way to fulfillment which brings about praise. Promise, fulfillment and praise is something like vocal round in the Christian life. It starts with one, and the praise of one might become the promise of the next who hears. The great crescendo of that is the promise of the resurrection. This sermon attempts to place us in those blessings and that praise.

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By Means

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Biblical Text: Numbers 21:4-9, John 3:14-21

We talk about the sacraments as “the means of grace”, in the everyday world we might refer to someone as a person of means, but I don’t think we really know what that word – means – means. Nor do we really plumb its depths. We don’t for two reasons. The first is that most of us are secular. We have buffered ourselves from what what Nicene Creeds calls the invisible creation. Not that it isn’t there and doesn’t effect us, simply that we deny it, usually with some fantastical pseudo-science. Although for me the best denials are the straight up “didn’t happen, who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes.” The second though is a spiritual reason. We think we want God to act immediately. We think we want the lightning bolt. This sermon is an exploration of God working through means and or reactions to that fact.

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Impermanance, Anxiety and the Hairs of Your Balding Head

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Biblical Text: Luke 21:5-28

What do me mean when we talk about last things?  There of course is the very literal, but other than 10,000 mile stuff, Jesus really doesn’t answer that.  Because that is not what we are talking about.  What we are talking about is impermanence and our anxiety caused by that impermanence.  And that is was Jesus goes after.  Even these “noble stones” of the temple will come down.  This thing that centers our identity will fail.  All earthly props will give way.  And Jesus goes on to name them.  And then he gives us a promise.  “Not a single hair of your head will perish.” 

You have both the knowledge and the promise.  The knowledge that yes, the world is impermanent.  Don’t place your faith in it, in any part of it.  The promise that there is a permanent thing, and that you are already a part of it.  The Kingdom of God is coming with power and great glory.  So straighten up an raise your heads.  Because this is your redemption.  This is your hour.

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